Thursday, February 02, 2006

Thursday Roundup

Keep movin', movin', movin',
Though they're disapprovin',
Keep them doggies movin' Rawhide!
Don't try to understand 'em,
Just rope and throw and grab 'em,
Soon we'll be living high and wide.


I've decided to start pursuing (at least intermittently) a new blogging practice with which most readers are familiar: The roundup. I won't be doing it Glenn Reynolds style ("Hmmmm .... [link] .... looka this ... [link]) -- I'll try to actually throw in some value-added and such -- but I read so many damn blogs that it seems a shame not to pass the word about them (especially given the obvious benefits of trackback as a traffic strategy).

By way of keeping continuity with the roundups I've been doing -- and because it's just plain good -- here's a piece on Steve Kubby situation from David M. Brown at Blogcritics.org. Of particular interest (and this is something that's been bugging me, too) is Brown's focus on the Cover Your Ass aspect of it all. Brown:

Kubby reported that his keepers forced him to sign a paper declaring that if he dies while in their custody, it's his fault, not theirs. Remember, these are the folks who by dragging Kubby back to the U.S. over the bogus drug charge put his life in unnecessary jeopardy to begin with.


Just so we have this clear up front, Mr. Fenocchio, local jail guards, and assorted other gummint goons: If you kill Steve, it will be you who killed Steve. Period. Weaseling won't help. We'll know. And inshallah, you'll pay, just like Eichmann and other assorted spiritual ancestors.

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Strange little trackback tag thing going here: Yesterday, I grabbed something from Malkin and related it to the Sheehan arrest (descending, briefly, to the snarkism I usually eschew). Along comes a trackback from Mark in Mexico, in turn relating it back to the original episode that Malkin was referring to, but not actually blogging about: The Islamists are all up in arms about a Danish paper's cartoon caricatures of Mohammed.

Hate to say it ... it's so out of character for this to happen since 9/11 unhinged her ... but on that I agree with Malkin. I may not like the hardcore Christian right, but I don't recall Christian mobs storming the office of the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Southern Baptist Convention boycotting New York, over Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ." As a matter of fact, Serrano's work went from major issue to cathedral display fodder in short order. In modern christendom, Eric Rudolph is the exception -- which is as it should be. It's up to the world's one billion Muslims to stop letting their nutjobs be the rule.

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Swing State Project talks up a 40-person slate of veterans running for Congress as Democrats. So, naturally, I got to thinking ... "which party has the most veterans in Congress already?" Fortunately, I am not the only one asking that question, and Richard Aragon has done the heavy lifting for both House (38 Democrats and 57 Republicans as of the end of 2005) and Senate (14 Democrats, 17 Republicans as of the end of 2004). Interestingly, the numbers change proportion if we look instead at combat veterans: The Democrats outnumbered the Republicans in the House 9-7 and each party had four in the Senate. Hardly sustains the portrayal of Democrats as "the peacenik party," does it?

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As always, Logan Ferree over at Freedom Democrats is doing the good work of determining -- and then publicizing -- just which "major" party is "more libertarian." Some might be surprised by the latest results. I'm not. For various reasons, the Republican Party is shucking the last vestiges of any pro-freedom orientation, while the Democrats are just beginning to slowly turn toward their pro-freedom roots. Hopefully the former trend will continue to feed the latter.

Hat-tip-wise, Logan also points to interesting stuff over at DailyKos's January straw poll. Pat Buchanan and Howard Dean have both proven how hard it is for the "activist insurgents" to land a major party nomination in the past ... but maybe the times they are a'changin'. Maybe.

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